China’s future in tennis looks cloudy, but Qinwen Zhengs is still bright

Qinwen Zheng was eleven years old in 2014 when Chinas Li Na won the women’s singles title at the Australian Open. Zheng has often spoken about List, which was a sort of one-woman tennis wave in her home country. It wasn’t until tennis was reintroduced as an Olympic sport in Seoul in 1988 that there was no tennis at all in China. (The first racquet sport was badminton.) But like many things in the West, it started to catch on there in the 1990s, and grew in popularity in the new century. The Chinese team won the women’s singles gold medal at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The rise of Lis brought the visibility of tennis to a completely different level. In 2011, she won the French Open, becoming the first Asian-born player, female or male, to win a Grand Slam. Three years later, tens of millions of television viewers in China watched Dominika Cibulkov at his best in the Australian Open final. Zheng was among them. At that moment I was still a child, and then he gave me a dream that an Asian player, a Chinese, can also win the Grand Slam, he recalled last year. By then, Zheng was in Wuhan, about two hundred and fifty miles from home, at the tennis academy where the leak went in 2010 at the urging of his father and where he lived for four years.

This year’s Australian Open kicks off this week, and Zheng is widely regarded as one of the youngest players in the women’s game. (The only younger player above him is Coco Gauff.) He’s tall, five feet ten; his topspin-foamed palm is penetrating. She’s tough and aggressive, and when her first serve is on, it’s spectacular, in her first-round match against Latvia’s Jelena Ostapenko at last summer’s US Open, she hit twenty-one aces. He trains tirelessly and is full of confidence. All in all, he has the makings of Lis’s successor. Many people, not only in China but also in the field of professional tennis, have been hoping and planning for a player like him ever since Li won his bigs a tennis generation ago. (Li, beset by knee injuries, retired shortly after his win in Australia.) China was supposed to be where tennis would grow in the 21st century, where new events would be staged on the tour, heavily sponsored by Chinese companies; where rackets and sneakers are sold in such numbers that the country would compete with the United States as a market for tennis equipment; where especially girls would play tennis, and the best ones became the stars of the game. (The boys were already crazy about basketball; there is currently only one Chinese player in the ATP Top 100, Zhizhen Zhang, ranked 96.)

New light tennis academies led by Western coaches opened in Chinese cities; sports management agencies went to China to scout for talent. (When she was a teenager, Zheng was managed by IMG, which also represented Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams.) The Australian Open began to brand itself as the Asia Slam, seeking to attract Chinese sponsors, tourists and television. – legal agreements. By 2019, tennis was estimated to be a four billion dollar business in China, second only to the United States and growing faster. At the time, Zheng had moved from Wuhan to Beijing, where he was coached by Argentinian coach Carlos Rodrguez, who had worked with Belgian star Justine Henin and Li Na in the latter stages of her career. Ten WTA tournaments were held in China in 2019, two more than in the United States. (There were also men’s tournaments in China, but fewer.) The WTA Finals were held for the first time in Shenzhen, which had outbid a number of other cities around the world and secured a ten-year contract to host the tournament. The total prize money for the tournaments that year was fourteen million dollars, five million more than the men’s ATP finals held in London; singles winner Ashleigh Barty earned $4.42 million, the most ever won by any player in a tennis tournament. It looked to the whole world that China was experiencing a boom the likes of which tennis had not seen since the American fever of the 60s and 70s.

But there were also signs that building the future of arguably the world’s most prominent women’s sport in an increasingly repressive authoritarian state might prove financially and morally precarious. Widespread street protests in Hong Kong against mainland Chinese interference in the semi-autonomous city’s governance led to the cancellation of the Hong Kong Open. Just months before the 2019 WTA Finals began, Chinese paramilitary officers used the Shenzhen Bay Sports Complex, where the tournament was to be held, as a stage to warn protesters in Hong Kong that the Chinese government could launch a strong crackdown. The WTA remained mum about this. We’ve had nothing but a good relationship with China, WTA President Micky Lawlera, the organizations key strategist expanded their presence in China. Times, in October 2019. They have been very good partners. The reason we love working in sports is because it should be about nothing but positive relationships.

Stay in the sport, in other words. But this position would prove untenable within months. Beijing’s response to the coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, with lockdowns, travel bans and other so-called zero-COVID measures, led to the cancellation of all international sporting events in China. Then in November 2021, Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai wrote a post on the social media platform Weibo accusing the former Chinese vice premier of sexual abuse during what she described as a years-long affair. – another case. The post was deleted within twenty minutes, and discussion of it was censored in China; The winner of two Grand Slam tournaments, Peng disappeared from the crowd. The WTA announced that it was suspending all of its tournaments in China because it was unable to communicate directly with Peng and be sure of his safety. He finally emerged during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, the only international sporting event to be held in China since the outbreak. COVID-19 in a carefully staged interview during which he claimed that his Weibo post had been misunderstood. His tennis players were not convinced.

There has been no women’s tennis in China for three years. Will there ever be again? Was the boom a bubble? China has changed its own COVID politics and reopening to the world, but so far there are no signs that it is ready or eager to host international sporting events. WTA CEO Steve Simon has said he wants to resolve the Peng case, but he sees no sign that China will investigate Peng’s allegations, which he believes is necessary. Without the Chinese tournaments, women’s tennis faces significant financial challenges. Prize money at these tournaments, likely invested in part to burnish the country’s image on the world stage, was often higher than at similar events held elsewhere in the world. That money is hard to find in Europe and America. The 2022 WTA Finals were held in Fort Worth, Texas last fall. Many seats were empty, and the purse was about a third of what it had been in Shenzhen three years ago.

Meanwhile, Qinwen Zheng is no longer in China. He has lived in Barcelona for the past few years and trained there with his coach Pere Riba with the aim of improving his footwork on the red clay of Spain, something many lightweight players have done in recent years. He has been quite open with reporters in his press conferences about his own personal journey, but he has been careful not to talk about the Chinese. COVID politics or its handling of the Peng Shuai case cautious, really, let alone China at all. It’s anyone’s guess how good a player he’ll be. It seems clear that, like all other tennis players, each in his own way, he is there, now, alone, ultimately playing for no one but himself.